info and man

[Paul King]

This is a pet peeve that has been bugging me ever since Linux has
adopted "info" as the standard for help documents. 

Am I the only one who finds info unwieldy and difficult to navigate
through? I use the word "difficult" loosely. If all I want is the
manpage for a command, I shouldn't have to navigate through anything
except that single document.

The interface for document navigation under info borrows none of the
conventions from other programs the way man did. Man used less
(sometimes more) as the way to present its troff/nroff-formatted
documents, and that was very simple to navigate (using /).

A new user would now have to know both less and whatever the thing is
that is used to navigate through the info nodes. I am not interested in
navigating through nodes; I just want information on a command. 

What is the word on man? Is that being phased out? Do we now have  to
store two formats of the same documentation? I noticed that doing an
"info ls" gives me the manpage inside of info. Are they similar formats?

Paul King


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